The reality is we all have “unpresentable parts”—parts of the body that are not evil but are to be “treated with greater modesty” (1 Corinthians 12:23). To call upon Christians—women and men—to cover up these parts is not cruel and unusual punishment. In truth, it’s an important way we honor God and love one another.

There are many complicated and confusing theological issues in the Christian life—issues that require deep intellectual research and sophisticated analysis, issues that call for multidisciplinary scholarship and expertise, issues that cannot be meaningfully addressed in an opinion column of several hundred words.

Thankfully, modesty is not one of those issues.

It seems that at least once a year, probably around spring and summer, Christians start arguing about modesty. As a pastor and a parent, I know this is a real-world issue that we can’t avoid. The biblical commands regarding modesty are something we will either heed, however imperfectly, or simply ignore. We should choose the former. To be sure, these discussions are always culturally conditioned and full of gray areas. The Bible doesn’t give us a catalog from Promise Lands’ End (I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist) featuring acceptable outfits and divinely approved bathing suits. Modesty won’t look exactly the same in every time, in every place, and in every context. But modesty in dress—and that’s the kind of modesty I’m thinking about in this piece—does mean something, and we can get to that something if we keep three simple truths in mind.

One, modesty can be too rigidly applied and too insensitively enforced. It’s hard to talk about modesty with Christians without someone recalling their harrowing experience with dresses that weren’t supposed to rise above the ankle, or with youth retreats doling out detailed lists of do’s and don’t’s, or with parents enforcing conformity to an austere aesthetic without much in the way of explanation or grace. And this is to say nothing of the awkward conversations—cringey at best and totally inappropriate at worst—that Christian men sometimes have with Christian women about their clothes or their figure. Since modesty often (but not always) has to do with what women wear, and since authority figures in conservative Christian circles are often (and rightly) men, fathers and pastors and church leaders and teachers ought to take great care in how they approach this subject. This first point is not mere throat clearing. Young women really have been hurt by the dumb and sometimes sinful things communicated by an overwrought modesty culture.

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